Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Boyproof Watch

(author's note: ever since I started getting into Steampunk I've had this recurring difficulty of explaining what it is, which sends me flailing around for a definition. Finally I've decided that instead of trying to describe it, I'd just write a Steampunk story, and publish it on the blog in serial form. So without further ado, here's the first installment.)

I

Professor Davenant Maskelyne
consorted with spirits and lived with automatons. The public visited his
Mechanical Theatre in droves and certain wealthy patrons had seen the inside of
his workshop, but no one ever called upon him at home. He was too frightening.

There are men who seek to assume
the façade of Mephistopheles, going through canisters of moustache wax and a
wardrobe full of red silk shirts to try and personate the devil. Such spiritual
braggarts rarely achieve any effect greater than mockery. But Professor Maskelyne
looked like Satan all the time. Even in the bathtub, his long oily black hair
and trimmed Van Dyke threaded into sharp points. His triangular crafty face had
a natural rougish tinge, and on hearing his deep sinister laugh one simultaneously
expected to see a sinuous tail with a barbed end dart out from between the
tails of his frock coat.

Modern thinkers may suggest that
the façade makes the man as much as the man makes the façade. For it is true
that a man like the Professor might have begun his life with the soul of a
saint, but when you sport the look of a lean Vice from a pageant play, what
road is a man’s character supposed to take? When babies stare and sob in your
presence, when fathers clutch their adolescent daughters as you pass them on
the street, when a merchant hesitates to take your coins, as if fearing them
heated—well. It gives a person a certain distant attitude towards humanity.

While they feared him, the
Professor was always in social demand. He was a dabbler in obscure areas of
knowledge and a master of some rare skills. Chief among these was clockwork.
His automatons, many of which were featured in nightly performance in his
theatre, were astonishing. Maskelyne understood clockwork not just as a
scientist, but as an artist. His creations did everything he had designed them
to do, and not just the ones that danced, strutted, declaimed and sang on his
specially designed stage. The worker automatons that he built on commission
swept floors, cleaned church windows and skittered through plumbing cleaning
scum and splooge efficiently and without malfunction. What was more, his
mechanizations performed their tasks with unmistakable flair and personality.
His patented mechanical rodent-catcher would end each massacre by curling up
and cleaning the blood off its needle-sharp fangs and razor-covered limbs with
an oiling mechanism located in its “mouth,” raising each limb to lap them
exactly like a cat washing itself. His mechanical housemaids would chuckle
appreciatively if you slapped their brass bottoms. And his mechanical parrots
not only flew around the room and pecked bird seed from your hand, but repeated
random phrases overheard from their owners in high tinny voices.

His ingenuity made him rich, and
his genius made him alluring. There was really only one aspect of his social
personality that bothered people. He hated children.

That’s not to say that he was cruel
to them. No one had ever seen him raise a hand to a child, even when it was the
infamous Ashdown twins. During their mother’s dinner party they had escaped
their German nanny and snuck under the dining room table, only to burst forth screaming
during the asparagus soup. Maskelyne had leapt up with a start only to discover
that his shoes had been tied, and he had tumbled with a thud at the feet of the
Master Butler. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ashdown received a lovely silver bracelet a
week later along with a short note of thanks for the invitation, and the matter
seemed settled.

But for the next month, the twins
complained separately and together of monsters hiding under the bed and behind
the curtains, particularly a demonic monkey who squeaked when it walked and watched
them with glowing red eyes as they slept. After Eustace had a screaming fit and
Clovis had stopped eating, the pair
were packed off to a boarding school in Trieste,
where they were said to be happy, most probably meaning that they had
reestablished their reign of terror.

Weeks later, the upstairs maid
noticed that the curtains of the room and low sections of the wainscoting had
strange dottings of dark oil. But since she had detested the boys she blamed
them for the mess and said nothing to her mistress.

Hey Jerry: many thanks! next installment in the next day or so--already a couple of sections in front of myself. And yes, gentle readers, I do have the whole story sketched out.

Hey Becca: You may well be right. Playing up that whole black/white thing from my website. But I would prefer that it's readable. Skipped over to your blog and really enjoyed it--lovely hearing about your art and life.

About Me

I'm a Seattle-based writer, playwright and director. For the last fifteen years I've worked as a freelance arts journalist, primarily for Seattle Weekly, where I was the theatre critic from 1995-2000, and subsequently as a theatre columnist from 2006-2008, then worked at The 5th Avenue Theatre for two years as their PR Manager. I've recently turned to fiction writing and am currently working on my second novel.